Let me begin by saying I’m nothing but a rando who loves Final Fantasy X. I’m not a philosophy major or even a minor, just a person who enjoys learning, either from video games or from reading. In fact, I try to merge everything I learn, to find the wisdom in each and thus strengthen them more than they ever could be apart.
Somebody one told me what defined true art was “when the orcs mean something.” Sure it’s cool to have dragons and stuff but a brilliant piece of art has to have some deeper meaning than that. Lord of the Rings isn’t really about an evil magic ring, it’s about the temptation of sin as symbolized in the One Ring. Final Fantasy X is considerably less subtle than LOTR but that is all to the good as most of us came to the game at a young age and there’s nothing inherently wrong in having simplified messages that are right on the nose.
What is FFX ultimately about? What is the profound message at its heart? I can only give my interpretation, citing the two sense which have resonated most with me for two decades: the Bevelle Trial and meeting Yunalesca.
While I’ve been playing FFX for two decades, I more recently came upon another game that tackled pretty much the same issues. What sets it apart is that it allows you to choose a (by way of analogy) “pro-Yevon route.” I won’t spoil the name of the game but if you know what game I‘m quoting from, good on you and please don’t spoil it for others.
Firstly, remember what Auron says:
Auron: Summoners challenge the bringer of death, Sin, and die doing so. Guardians give their lives to protect their summoner. The fayth are the souls of the dead. Even the maesters of Yevon are unsent. Spira is full of death. Only Sin is reborn, and then only to bring more death. It is a cycle of death, spiraling endlessly.
Now from the other game:
Main Villain: All mysteries forever unanswered. All purposes constructed from meaninglessness. No endings to being closure. Only a Wheel, turning without mercy, grinding our spirits to dust.
PC: You're right, that's no way to live.
Now look to FFX:
Yunalesca: Hope is…comforting. It allows us to accept fate, however tragic it might be.
The other game:
Woman: What if we can be assured of nothing?
PC: Then the fewer people who realize that, the better. People need to know that things happen for a reason. A fabricated reason is better than none at all.
FFX is not about a giant doomwhale; we don’t have flying, gravity magic wielding monsters in the real world so clearly that isn’t what FFX is substantively about any more than Godzilla was about a rampaging dinosaur. No, what I take FFX to be about is based on the Yunalesca quote I used as a thread title and also this quote from Grand Maester Mika:
Mika: Men die. Beasts die. Trees die. Even continents perish. Only the power of death truly commands in Spira. Resisting its power is futile.
Sorrow and death pervade every facet of life and that IS something we can understand, something true of both Spira and our Earth. And then the question becomes “how do we deal with this horrible fact?” I wanna quote from philosophers on this matter to help elucidate FFX’s theme.
Possibly the most famous philosopher to a lot of regular people is Friedrich Nietzsche. Primarily known for Ubermensch, a glorious moustache, and having his ideas taken up/distorted by the Nazis, Nietzsche was (at one point) an enthusiastic follower of a much less famous German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer. Dubbed the “Philosopher of Pessimism,” he never tired in showing how the world is an awful place and the only sane or moral response to it is to give up on life altogether.
Now it is quote time. I recently just read all this myself since I’m also a pessimist and eager to read about this justification from people a lot smarter and more well-informed than myself.
First off, a brief summary of Schopenhauer vs. Nietzsche. This is from the book Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche's Educator, specifically the chapter "Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: Honest Atheism, Dishonest Pessimism" by David Berman
Quote:
I suggest that Schopenhauer's pessimism has three main strands, all of which stem from his atheistic metaphysics of will. Because the thing in itself is will, because, that is, there is only blind will to life,
(pI) there can be no real or objective purpose in the world;
(p2) there will always be more pain and suffering than pleasure and happiness; and
(P3) to live is to sin, to be immoral.
[…]
One way of putting this last point is to say that although Schopenhauer was a metaphysical pessimist, he was an epistemological optimist. That is, although the world is bad, knowledge about it is good, indeed profoundly liberating. Of course, in one sense, there is nothing very distinctive in such optimism. Schopenhauer probably shares this with nearly all philosophers, from Plato at least to the Age of Reason. Yet it was, as I will argue, important for Nietzsche, in that Schopenhauer's epistemological optimism caused Nietzsche to embrace, or at least consider, what can be called epistemological pessimism.
This is a memorable passage from Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy:
What this all means is helpfully explained in Julian Young’s Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art:Quote:
But when one once more becomes aware of this everyday reality, it becomes repellent; this leads to a mood of asceticism, of denial of the will. This is something that Dionysian man shares with Hamlet: both have truly seen to the essence of things, they have understood (erkannt), and action repels them; for their action can change nothing in the eternal essence of things, they consider it ludicrous or shameful that they should be expected to restore order to the chaotic world. Understanding (Erkenntniss) kills action, action depends on a veil of illusion—this is what Hamlet teaches us [….].
Professor Young said Platonic. I'm sure everyone at least know the name Plato? Perhaps you know of his Allegory of the Cave? In brief, it was the idea that human life is like living imprisoned in a cave and seeing nothing but shadows on a wall. Since this is all you know, you assume those shadows are the real world. Then somebody (the philosopher) escapes into the light of the Sun and sees reality, sees how the things the prisoners (ie. most humans) take to be real are in fact a pale, distorted, imitation of the real. Plato was an optimist about the real world, he thought everything had a purpose and order. Schopenhauer rejected that but he was still an optimist about escaping the cave – this world of illusion – and seeing the truth of our existence. Nietzsche disagreed with all of this as talked about in the paper “Nietzsche, Truth, and the Horror of Existence” by PJ KainQuote:
The "Dionysian" type, on the other hand, knows the Heraclitean truth of things. The (pre-Socratic) Greeks knew it: they were possessed of "Dionysian truth," "tragic vision." That they were susceptible to "overwhelming dismay in the face of the titanic powers of nature, the Moira [fate] enthroned inexorably over all knowledge" (BT 1) is recorded in their myths; in particular, in the tragic myths of the humanitarian Prometheus and the wise Oedipus (ibid.). (Notice the resemblance between "Dionysian wisdom" and Schopenhauer's "feeling of the [dynamically] sublime" [see ch. 1, sec. 8]. This provides a hint as to the kind of solution to the terror of life Nietzsche will ultimately propose.) It is this that threatens lifedenying nausea, Buddhistic negation of the will: "Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things;... knowledge kills action; action requires the veil of illusion" (BT 7).
But let us first do away with metaphor. What is the "long slow pain" to which Nietzsche refers? It is, in a word, the death of God, an event which, though formally announced for the first time only in section 125 of The Gay Science, was in fact acutely present to Nietzsche from the very outset of his philosophical career. The pain is the pain of confronting the "terror and horror," the "heartbreaking and cruel character" of existence - "what I desire most," he wrote to Heinrich von Stein in December 1882, "is a high point from which I can see the tragic problem lying beneath me. I would like to take away from human existence some of its heartbreaking and cruel character" - without the "metaphysical comfort" brought to us by theistic belief. The problem is suffering and our vulnerability to it: not all suffering (not the pain of dentistry, for example) but rather suffering for which we can discover no redeeming purpose or justification, suffering that disposes us to view life as "nauseating." Without God life appears to be "absurd" and (save for extinction) there appears to be no deliverance from it.
[..]
But while recording the role of illusion in human life with unprecedented thoroughness, Schopenhauer's stance towards it is always Platonic - contemptuous. The cause of this is his philosopher's morality, his care for truth - the fact that, as Nietzsche would put it, possessing an "unconditional will to truth" he is "still pious" (GS 344). This prevents him from entertaining the distinctively Nietzschean idea that illusion, "art, " is "'more divine' than truth," prevents him making the inference that since "we have need of lies in order to live," well then, let there then be lies (WP 853).
Now let’s get back to Final Fantasy X. Mika and Yunalesca are keenly aware of the “terror and horror of existence.” Their mission, no matter how misguided, was to try and save Spira from ultimate despair. That despair can be seen in the character of Seymour – a man who looked too deep at the reality of the world beyond the illusions that justify life and came to the conclusion life is completely unjustifiable. Auron’s comment about Mika and Seymour not being of one mind is perfectly representative of this. Mika and Seymour both know it is a “veil of illusion” that makes life bearable in Spira and Mika accepts this. Seymour does not. Seymour takes Yunalesca’s “I will free you before you can drown in your sorrow. It is better for you to die in hope than to live in despair. Let me be your liberator" and applies it to all of Spira. As far as he is concerned, everybody is already drowning in their sorrow and they must be liberated from it.Quote:
There is nothing Nietzsche would reject more, we can say, than Plato's allegory of the cave.34 We cannot climb up out of the cave and look directly at the truth. It would probably kill us. There is a reason why we are down in the cave with our backs to the truth. All that advice that circulates at the bottom of the cave, that we should stay there, that it is lunacy to try to get out, is damned good advice. It is true that the shadows at the bottom of the cave are illusions, distortions, lies. But it is not true that the shadows lock us into a prison. They keep out the horror.
In Will to Power, he says, "there is only one world, and this is false, cruel, contradictory, seductive, without meaning.. . We have need of lies in order to conquer this reality, this 'truth,' that is, in order to live? That lies are necessary in order to live is itself part of the terrifying and questionable character of existence."45
But why is this all necessary? Is it just pain that is the problem? People can’t live with pain so life is worthless? That can’t be right. Everybody from the Crusaders to the Summoners and their guardians goes through immense hardship to try and help the people of Spira. They voluntarily risk their lives (and the vast majority of them die forgotten) and self-evidently go through a lot of pain. And despite Sin’s presence, life for normal people has continued in Spira for 1,000 years.
Remember my earlier quote from Yunalesca:
Yunalesca: Hope is…comforting. It allows us to accept fate, however tragic it might be. [..] Yevon’s teachings and the Final Summoning give the people of Spira hope. Without hope, they would drown in their sorrow.
Or what Mika says:
Yuna: But what of Sin? I am a summoner, my lord, like my father before me! I am on a pilgrimage to stop the death that Sin brings. Are you… Are you telling me that, too, is futile? Grand Maester Mika, I am not alone! All the people who have opposed Sin… Their battles, their sacrifices– were they all in vain?
Mika: Not in vain. No matter how many summoners give their lives, Sin cannot be truly defeated. The rebirth cannot be stopped. Yet the courage of those who fight gives the people hope. There is nothing futile in the life and death of a summoner.
I wanna connect this to something else Nietzsche said at the end of his On the Genealogy of Morality
Summoners and guardians go through hellish Pilgrimages “because they had hope” because they have ‘meaning” to suffer. And for the average denizen of Spira, “a fabricated reason is better than none at all” to keep them going in the face of all this pain.Quote:
"...suffering itself was not his problem, instead, the fact that there was no answer to the question he screamed, ‘Suffering for what?’ Man, the bravest animal and most prone to suffer, does not deny suffering as such: he wills it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not the suffering, was the curse that has so far blanketed mankind…”
But for you who might know something of Nietzsche as that “Anti-Christ guy” he does offer a very withering and relevant critique of Yevon in the form of what he calls the “Ascetic Ideal.”
From Brian Leiter’s article “The Truth is Terrible”
The relevance to Yevon’s teachings seem obvious enough. Narratively, Sin embodies the human dread of death and sorrow. But it’s called “Sin” not “Death” and we are told this is because:Quote:
...namely, how does the “ascetic ideal” taught by the priests seduce the “majority of mortals”—the “physiological casualties and…disgruntled” (GM III:1) as he calls them--back to life? “[S]uffering itself was not [the] problem,” Nietzsche notes; the problem was the meaning of suffering, “Suffering for what?” (GM III:28). In short, “the meaninglessness of suffering, not the suffering, was the curse which has so far blanketed mankind” (GM III:28). What makes the terrible existential truths about the human situation terrible is precisely that they are utterly meaningless. For the majority of mortals, the teaching of the “ascetic ideal” gives those terrible existential truths a meaning, but a meaning of a particularly perverse kind. It explains their suffering, falsely, as a consequence of their own moral inadequacies—their own failures to live up to ascetic ideals—and thus at least allows them to discharge the ressentiment that suffering produces, albeit against themselves.10 The key mechanism by which this purportedly occurs is worth quoting at some length:
[E]very sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering; still more precisely, a perpetrator, still more specifically a guilty perpetrator who is receptive to suffering—in short, some living thing on which, in response to some pretext or other, he can discharge his affects in deed or in effigy: for the discharge of affect is the sufferer’s greatest attempt at relief, namely at anesthetization—his involuntarily craved narcotic against torment of any kind.
Yuna: Sin is our punishment for our vanity. And it will not go away until we’ve atoned.
Sorrow is an inevitable part of life but if you can tell people that this sorrow has a cause, even if the cause is themselves, it makes life more bearable. It’s not the optimal solution but it can keep us living when we have every reason to become Seymour.
Was Yevon wrong in what it did? Perhaps. But it is important to remember that the circumstances of FFX are unprecedented. Jecht and Tidus being from Dream Zanarkand, their connection, the presence of an ancient airship that can blow apart Sin – these things have never occurred until the events of the game. I think Yunalesca’s candor and Mika Sending himself when he thinks all hope is lost and everybody in Spira will die shows that their goal was never power. Their goal was the preservation of life in Spira. Through illusions, through lies, but still they wanted life to continue and for people to be as happy as it’s possible to be in a world that is overflowing with purposeless pain.
And so I think FFX ultimately presents the human condition in all its awfulness and gives us three ways of dealing with it: living through "false hope", nihilism, and the option the story clearly favors, choosing to honestly live and "fight your sorrow."
If any of you read all this, thank you. I've been thinking about this even before starting my latest run of FFX. If you are interested in Arthur Schopenhauer or Friedrich Nietzsche because of this, that's awesome. They are great reads and I highly recommend them.
